Girls Just Want To Have Fun

Iran's president, always the clear-thinking rationalist, has announced that the best age for girls to get married was between sixteen and eighteen. Mister Ahmadinejad went on to suggest that boys should wait until they were nineteen to twenty-one. This comes six years after Iran's parliament raised the legally acceptable age of marriage for girls to fifteen from nine. This then sounds like real wisdom coming from the world's favorite Members Only model. Authorities have been encouraging marriage as a way to fight what they call the "spread of immorality among youth."
Maybe someone should point out to the hard-liners and clerics that immorality is the province of youth. Or at least it should be. That's why "the man" is so very hard on young folks, not just in Iran, but all across the globe. It's like Will Smith said, back before he became "the man": Parents just don't understand. Maybe that's why Will is so down with his nine year old daughter whipping her hair around like that. But I don't guess that even the former Fresh Prince would be down with Willow getting hitched to Justin Bieber.
Meanwhile, back in a country where two-thirds of the population is under thirty and more than sixty percent of university graduates are women, Iranian politicians try to figure out just how they can appeal to this young, educated, mostly female electorate. The fact that they aren't simply locking them up and even allowing them to vote seems impossibly progressive for a country whose president dances on the line of hypocrisy and psychotic with lines like, "I don't know why some countries do not want to understand the fact that the Iranian people do not tolerate force." The same country where stoning is a punishment and not a pastime. Maybe they should just lure kids into watching MTV long enough to catch a few episodes of "16 and Pregnant."